No Tears
by ashhead
Summary: Kate went to see Jack after the Others took the guns, but she didn't find forgiveness and she wants to make him pay.


A/N: Thanks to Sam for beta-ing this for me. It's set just after The Hunting Party, and consider yourself warned for mentions of rape and character death.

There were no tears. She had thought that there might be, this time. There had never been any tears before, but this time it was different. Still, there were no tears, so maybe it wasn't that different. Dry eyes watched the tendril of smoke swirl away from his body, drifting upwards. She wondered if it was his soul, if a man such as him can ever claim to have a soul. But it can't be his soul, his soul wouldn't get to go up, his would seep downwards into the fiery earth.

These thoughts make her uncomfortable, because even though he was a bad person and even though he had hurt her, she had killed him. So if his soul goes downwards, hers would have to go deeper still. So no, it's not a soul she sees escaping him. There are no souls, only bad people who do bad things.

She was somewhat comforted by these thoughts, although comfort was not the right word for what she felt right now. Her body felt battered in every possible way, each movement was intensely painful in a way that went past the worst agony of anything she had felt before. She had been beaten before, beaten badly at times, but never to the extent that he had seen fit to. Her left arm was broken, he had said to come by later and he'd fix up for her, so she had, but not to let him patch her up. She looked at his lifeless corpse that had crumpled to the floor, he was never going to touch her again, she'd made sure of that. Even with his blood splattered all over the walls of his tent the world had lost some of its redness; it was cleaner now, purer.

With her job done, with all her debts repaid she turned away from the heap of flesh on the floor. This place had been corrupted by him, even the air was tainted, and she wanted to be away from it. Each step away from him was a battle, pulling at the tears in her skin so that a fresh wave of blood poured from her. Each movement caused her useless left arm to bang against her chest, jerking the snapped bones. Each breath brought back memories of his body thrusting against hers, bruising and ripping the skin every time her touched her. But each time she came out victorious, with the sound of that one gunshot in her mind she walked freely, knowing he could never touch her.

She had gone to him to apologise, as ridiculous as that was. She supposed she had more of her mother in her than she realised. She had gone crawling to him for his forgiveness in the same way she had watched her mother go crawling to Wayne. He didn't know what had happened, but he blamed her for losing the guns, so she had gone to him, to explain, to make him forgive her. He didn't know what it was like to be held by them, to be kept blind by the itching cloth of the hood they'd put over her head. He didn't know what it was like to feel hands on her body and not to know where they were going to know next, to not know whether they were there to lead her or hurt her. She wanted to make him know, but it turned out that he already did.

He hadn't cared about what she had to say, he wasn't concerned over what might have happened to her in captivity, all he cared about was that he had lost his precious guns. He'd done much worse to her than those who had used her to get the guns away from him, and she was certain that they were in better hands now. She couldn't help think that it was fitting that he had died at the hands of what he'd thought he'd lost in the hands of the woman he'd blamed for losing them.

When she made her way out of his tent, relishing the fresh air that was filled with the acrid taste of his blood, the others were beginning to make their way towards her, drawn by the noise of the gunshot. They stopped when they saw her, and she couldn't even begin to imagine what they saw. Her face was a messy picture, her lower lip swollen and split, blood still dripping from it. One eye was closed up, a rainbow of colours surrounding it. The cheek on the other side of her face was sporting a purple mark that her blood encrusted hair only partly masked.

They watched her, all of them, all the people that she had thought that she trusted. Not one of them moved, no one spoke. She walked silently through them, a ghost drifting through their midst.

In the end, Locke took the initiative. He forced his eyes past her ripped, bloody clothing to look at her swollen face. Then he came towards her and gently pried the gun from her aching hand, his fingers coming back bloody. "Is he dead," Locke's voice was a whisper, but still someone gasped, only just realising what the implications of Kate's beaten appearance were.

Unable to find the words to explain, Kate merely nodded. Jack was dead, she had killed him, and she wasn't sorry.


End file.
